I've spent much of the past two days trying to find and being disappointed by every CRM tool I try. All I want from a CRM is label some of my contacts in different categories and then have the tool track my sent email to tell me how long its been since I last contacted them. Currently I use Google Apps (i.e. branded gmail) for my email - but I would be willing to switch back to outlook for this. This would require all of a few thousand lines of code. Has anyone seen this feature.

MailChimp provides the same type of service that some CRM systems (like Salesforce) provide. However, it is ideal for the small business owner who may not need all of the other bundled CRM components, and just want a service for email campaigns.

Pricing
A free account is offered with a 500 subscriber limit—subscribers being those recipients on your email lists—and with a limit of 3000 sends

Thanks for the suggestion Tim, Mail Chimp will be very useful when it comes to writing and sending a newsletter, however I was looking for something to notice when I haven't email individual clients. I was hoping that this mythical tool would just raise a reminder and say its been a month since you talked.

This is a mostly manual solution, but may work if you don't have thousands of contacts. Have a look at Xobni, an Outlook add-in. You can then click on each of your contacts in the Contacts folder and it will display the last email sent to that person. That means you don't have to set up any parameters on how long to contact someone etc. and you can make decisions based on content, knowledge of the contact etc.

@Paul - trust me I've googled, read reviews and trialled a number of CRM tools. None that I can find have this feature. For about five minutes I even considered switching back to outlook.

@Neil - I know and like Xobni, I've used it on and off since its original beta. However I've moved away from Outlook and have embraced the joy of the cloud. All of my email, contacts etc are already in gmail so something that integrates with GMail would be best. In terms of that feature GMail already offers something like it, but I'm trying to track my contacts with over 100 people and don't want it to be a full time job.

There do seem to be a lot of people developing for the Google platform. If there is an API for searching Sent Items, then it seems as though it should be possible to build a button for this. Whether one exists in the GoogleCode archive or elsewhere, I have no idea.